Each entry on this list of common misconceptions is worded as a correction; the misconceptions themselves are implied rather than stated. These entries are concise summaries; the main subject articles can be consulted for more detail.
Ancient history
The Pyramids of Egypt were not constructed with slave labor. Archaeological evidence shows that the laborers were a combination of skilled workers and poor farmers working in the off-season with the participants paid in high-quality food and tax exemptions.a. b. c. The idea that slaves were used originated with Herodotus, and the idea that they were Israelites arose centuries after the pyramids were constructed. Galleys in ancient times were not commonly operated by chained slaves or prisoners, as depicted in films such as Ben Hur, but by paid laborers or soldiers, with slaves used only in times of crisis, in some cases even gaining freedom after the crisis was averted. Ptolemaic Egypt was a possible exception. Other types of vessels, such as Roman merchant vessels, were manned by slaves, sometimes even with slaves as ship's master. Tutankhamun's tomb is not inscribed with a curse on those who disturb it. This was a media invention of 20th-century tabloid journalists. The Minoan civilization was not destroyed by the eruption of Thera, nor was it the inspiration for Plato's parable of Atlantis. The eruption did destroy some settlements such as Akrotiri on Thera and may have contributed to regional social shifts, but its direct impact on Crete was limited, and the period following the eruption is often considered the high point of Minoan civilization.a. b. c.
The ancient Greeks did not use the word "idiot" () to disparage people who did not take part in civic life. An was simply a private citizen as opposed to a government official. The word also meant any sort of non-expert or layman, then later someone uneducated or ignorant, and much later to mean stupid or mentally deficient.
Ancient Rome The so-called Roman salute, in which the arm is fully extended forwards or diagonally with palm down and fingers touching, was not used in ancient Rome. The gesture was first associated with ancient Rome in the 1784 painting The Oath of the Horatii by the French artist Jacques-Louis David, which inspired later salutes, most notably the Nazi salute.
Wealthy Ancient Romans did not use rooms called vomitoria to purge food during meals so they could continue eating and vomiting was not a regular part of Roman dining customs. A vomitorium is a passageway out of a stadium allowing quick exit at the end of an event. Both "vomit" and "vomitorium" derive from a Latin term meaning "to spew forth". Scipio Aemilianus did not sow salt over the city of Carthage after defeating it in the Third Punic War.a. : "a tradition in Roman history well known to most students" b. c. : "this story... had already gained widespread currency" d. : "the frequently repeated story" Julius Caesar was not born via caesarean section. Such a procedure would have been fatal to the mother at the time, and Caesar's mother was still alive when he was 45 years old."[A mother in the 1st century AD] could not survive the trauma of a Caesarean" Oxford Classical Dictionary, Third Edition, "Childbirth" There is no proof that Julius Caesar ever said "Et tu, Brute?" ("You too, Brutus?") during his assassination. Instead, the prevailing theories are that he remained silent, or that his last words were "καὶ σύ, τέκνον?" ("You too, child?"). The popular misconception comes from the play Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. Roman soldiers were not paid in salt, although the word salary comes from the Latin salarium 'related to salt'. A salarium may have been a salt allowance, but even that is not supported by ancient sources.
Middle Ages
Europe
The Middle Ages were not "a time of ignorance, barbarism and superstition"; the term "Dark Ages" is rejected by modern historians.a. b. c. d. While modern life expectancies are much higher than those in the Middle Ages and earlier, adults in the Middle Ages did not die in their 30s or 40s on average, as it is commonly inferred from the life expectancy of the time. While such an estimate was the life expectancy at birth, this was skewed by high infant and adolescent mortality. The life expectancy among adults was much higher; a 21-year-old man in medieval England, for example, could expect to live to the age of 64. In the tale of King Canute and the tide, the king did not command the tide to reverse in a fit of delusional arrogance. According to the story, his intent was to prove to sycophantic advisors that no man is all-powerful, and that all people must bend to forces beyond their control, such as the tides. There is no evidence that jus primae noctis ("the right of the first night")—a supposed legal right for a lord to sleep with a bride on her wedding night—ever existed in the Middle Ages.
People in the Middle Ages did not refrain from bathing out of fear of opening pores and catching diseases. Throughout the Middle Ages, public bathhouses were common, particularly in large towns and cities, serving as significant social hubs. There is no evidence that iron maidens were used for torture, or even yet invented, in the Middle Ages. Instead they were pieced together in the 18th century from several artifacts found in museums, arsenals and the like to create spectacular objects intended for commercial exhibition. Spiral staircases in castles were not designed in a clockwise direction to hinder right-handed attackers. While clockwise spiral staircases are more common in castles than anticlockwise, they were even more common in medieval structures without a military role, such as religious buildings. The plate armor of European soldiers did not stop soldiers from moving around or necessitate a crane to get them into a saddle. They needed to be able to fight on foot in case they could not ride their horse and could mount and dismount without help. However, armor used in tournaments in the late Middle Ages was significantly heavier than that used in warfare. Whether chastity belts, devices designed to prevent women and men from having sexual intercourse, were invented in medieval times is disputed by modern historians. Most existing chastity belts are now thought to be deliberate fakes from the 19th century.
Medieval European scholars did not believe the Earth was flat. Scholars have known the Earth is spherical since at least the sixth century BCE. However, most Medieval Europeans did believe that the sun revolved around the Earth, which was first challenged by astronomers such as Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei. Medieval cartographers did not regularly write "here be dragons" on their maps. The only maps from this era that have the phrase inscribed on them are the Hunt-Lenox Globe and the Ostrich Egg Globe, next to a coast in Southeast Asia for both of them. Maps in this period did occasionally have illustrations of mythical or real animals.a. b. c. Christopher Columbus' efforts to obtain support for his voyages were not hampered by belief in a flat Earth, but by worries that the East Indies were farther than Columbus presumed. In fact, Columbus grossly underestimated the Earth's circumference because of two calculation errors. The myth that Columbus proved the Earth was round was propagated by authors like Washington Irving in A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Columbus was not the first European to visit the Americas:a. b. Leif Erikson, and possibly other Norsemen before him, explored Vinland, an area of coastal North America. Excavations at L'Anse aux Meadows prove that at least one Norse settlement was built in Newfoundland, confirming a story in the Saga of Erik the Red. The Norse did not name Iceland "Iceland" as a ploy to discourage oversettlement. According to the Sagas of Icelanders, Hrafna-Flóki Vilgerðarson saw icebergs on the island when he traveled there, and named the island after them. Popular legend holds that Greenland was named in the hopes of attracting settlers.a. b. . c.
Vikings There is no evidence that Viking warriors wore horns on their helmets, with which they are typically depicted in popular fiction; this would have been impractical in battle. Vikings did not drink out of the skulls of vanquished enemies. This was based on a mistranslation of the skaldic poetic use of ór bjúgviðum hausa (branches of skulls) to refer to drinking horns.E. W. Gordon, Introduction to Old Norse (2nd edition, Oxford 1962) pp. lxix–lxx.
Early modern
The Mexica people of the Aztec Empire did not mistake Hernán Cortés and his landing party for gods during Cortés' conquest of the empire. This notion came from Francisco López de Gómara, who never went to Mexico and concocted the myth while working for the retired Cortés in Spain years after the conquest. The elite of the Dutch Golden Age wore black clothes primarily as a status symbol rather than out of Puritan self-restraint. The clothes attracted status from the difficulty of the dyeing process and the cost of elaborate embellishments. Shah Jahan, the Indian Mughal Emperor who commissioned the Taj Mahal, did not cut off the hands of the rumored 40,000 workers or lead designers so as to not allow the construction of another monument more beautiful than the Taj Mahal. This is an urban myth that goes back to the 1960s. The story that Isaac Newton was inspired to research the nature of gravity when an apple fell on his head is almost certainly apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea came to him as he sat "in a contemplative mood" and "was occasioned by the fall of an apple". Marie Antoinette did not say "let them eat cake" when she heard that the French peasantry was starving due to a shortage of bread. The phrase was first published in Rousseau's Confessions, written when Marie Antoinette was only nine years old and not attributed to her, just to "a great princess". It was first attributed to her in 1843.
While it could vary widely by socioeconomic class, specific period and culture, and individual families and couples, the general idea that women in modern history up until the mid-20th century typically stayed home as housewives while men worked is a modern myth and a "traditional" ideal rather than a long-standing reality. Throughout history, women have consistently worked in agriculture, manufacturing, and family businesses, often working 12–15 hours a day.
North America The early settlers (commonly known as Pilgrims) of the Plymouth Colony in North America usually did not wear all black, and their capotains (hats) did not include buckles. Instead, their fashion was based on that of the late Elizabethan era. The traditional image was formed in the 19th century when buckles were a kind of emblem of quaintness.a. b. (The Puritans, who settled in the adjacent Massachusetts Bay Colony shortly after the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, did frequently wear all black.) Nor did most Pilgrims use blunderbusses, as they are often pictured. People accused of witchcraft were not burned at the stake during the Salem witch trials. Of the accused, nineteen people convicted of witchcraft were executed by hanging, at least five died in prison, and one man was pressed to death by stones while trying to extract a confession from him.a. b. c. George Washington did not have wooden teeth. His dentures were made of lead, gold, hippopotamus ivory, the teeth of various animals, including horse and donkey teeth, and human teeth, possibly bought from slaves or poor people. Because ivory teeth quickly became stained, they may have had the appearance of wood to observers.